Please see an important announcement at the end of this column on how you can help secure America's energy independence.
All next week will be rallying on behalf of coal on Ransom Notes Radio. Coal means cheap energy; coal means more jobs; coal means America's energy independence.
Every year I celebrate Earth Day with tips and ideas on how readers can expand their carbon footprint. Now, below, you’ll find the newest, top ten ways I recommend to expand your carbon footprint on October 29th, 2013 Anno Domini, to celebrate Count on Coal Day.
10) Take unnecessary trips in your electric car.
Run that battery down to nothing. Electric cars need fuel and that fuel comes from power plants that run mostly on coal. There’s no quicker way to expand your carbon footprint than using that “green” car and powering it up nightly.
9) Use a Metro Light Rail system instead of your car.
“When taken as a whole, then,” writes Cato’s Randal O’Toole, “most transit systems with light rail use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases per passenger kilometre than they did when they operated only buses. Most also use more energy and emit more carbon dioxide, per passenger kilometre, than typical automobiles.”
O’Toole says that light rail only appeals to: 1) downtown real estate interests; 2) Seimens, the light rail contractor; and 3) people who hate autos.
All aboard!
8) Move to Germany!
Yes, the model for renewable energy development in the industrial world has yielded impressive results. And they do it by subsidizing a new, technological breakthrough that’s coming to you very soon. Yes, very soon we’ll all be able to power our electric vehicles through coal-powered plants that supplement coal with the use of wood.
Mmmm. I don’t know about you, but I just love the smell of a wood fire wafting around the city. It makes it smell like Christmas- or Winter Holi-Day for of you who are only “spiritual.” For atheists, the smell can remind you of December 25th, 2012 C.E.
Recommended
7) Build a wind farm.
You too can find out what rural, depression era residents knew: The widespread adoption of wind power eventually will lead to the creation of a large, nationalized effort to electrify the country with more reliable, fossil or hydro-based electrical generation, just as they did with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Since nuclear and hydro are impossible to permit, prepare for coal-fired and oil-fired plants to come out of mothballs.
There’s nothing like the smell of diesel wafting around a city to remind people that it’s Earth Day, C.E. Infinity or, for those of us who are heretics and apostates, May 22nd, 2013 A.D.
6) Move into Al Gore’s house.
No house in America uses more fossil fuel than Big Al’s. According to one source Gore buys coal left over from the age of Charles Dickens, extracted by Welsh miners, who on average were paid less than a penny per day. It’s transported to America an old diesel powered bulk freighter named I’ll Always Be the Real Number 43.
Gore then uses the black, Welsh, rock to boil water that heats his 23 swimming pools, 271 waterfalls and keep his mountain streams at a constant 77 degrees for the benefit of his pet koi.
There are other ways moving in with Al can help expand our carbon footprint. Can our readers identify them all?
5) Buy a Chevy Volt.
In addition to the massive amount of fossil-fuel generated electricity that Volt uses and the pollution from the manufacture and disposal of the $8,000 battery, there is one other ways that the Chevy Volt expands our earth’s environmental footprint.
While spontaneous engine fires so far have failed to consume an entire Volt, the winner of the 2012 European Journalist award for Car of the Year (C.E.), scientists estimate that a fully consumed GM green car would emit more carbon than another Al Gore run for the presidency.
There, I’ve done it: Gore 2016?
I’m super serial. And super awesome.
The end.
4) Blog about the vast right-wing conspiracy.
No new technology in the past 30 years has contributed to increasing fossil fuel emissions than the adoption of computer technology. From server farms, to high-speed networks, to computer chip enabled phones, tablets and PCs, the electronic age is consuming more and more electricity.
And since the U.S. has failed to adopt progressive, European renewable energy policies like burning wood in stoves, water heaters and furnaces, the leading sources of renewable hot air in the U.S. comes from blogging.
So plug in those IPhones, tablets and PCs. And write with indignation about Big Oil, while pretending to be green.
“Let’s Pretend,” as we know, is a very important keystone of many liberal policies.
3) Support 420!
Quick: Does anyone know how much carbon is in a gram of weed? Does anyone who cares about weed, care about the environment? If you had to pick between smoking weed and the environment, which would you pick?
That’s right, you’d be eating brownies or drinking tea made from ganja.
Bunch of Tea Baggers.
2) Live in a tiny house.
OK, living in a tiny house will do nothing to expand your carbon footprint. But it would be really funny to see you guys blow out the fuse box of a mini house when you overload the electrical system charging you car, your tablet, your PC, your phone and your E-420 stick, while washing your clothes in a mountain stream.
Actually, I think ALL environmentalists should be forced to register as high-capacity B.S. magazines and forced to live in houses measuring only 200 square feet.
Although I think the right of free speech shouldn’t be abridged, no one should be allowed to dish out as much bull as they do and cause as much damage without some control over how quickly they re-load.
1) Occupy Wall Street, again.
Who can forget the day the people who Occupied Wall Street in order to save the world left behind 26 loads of garbage?
“I pick up garbage [for a living], and these were some of the worst smells I’ve ever experienced,’’ one sanitation worker told the NY Post.
Gives a whole new meaning to carbon footprint.
Priceless.
Washington, D.C. – Several thousand people from America’s coal communities will rally on Capitol Hill October 29, 2013, to protest new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency that have put their jobs and livelihoods at risk. Company and union employees joined by coal-dependent families and local officials will voice their concerns with members of Congress. For more information, please contact Gill Stevens at gstevens@countoncoal.org or Michael Causey at mcausey@countoncoal.org.
WHO: American energy workers, Members of Congress public officials, and labor leaders, including:
Senator Mitch McConnell (KY), Senator Joe Manchin (WV), Rep. Hal Rogers (KY-05), Rep. Steve Daines (MT), and others
John Roeber, President of the Montana State Building and Construction Trades Council and Montana Business Manager of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers (Butte, MT)
Ray Ventrone, Business Manager for Boilermakers Local 154 (Pittsburgh, PA)
WHAT: Rally for American Energy Jobs
WHERE: U.S. Capitol, West Front
WHEN: October 29th, 2013, 11:00AM – 1:00PM EDT
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